Which brings me to something I notice constantly and have never seen properly explained: the extraordinary rate at which the language of work churns while the underlying ideas stay still.
Morale became job satisfaction became engagement became, latterly, thriving and belonging. Suggestion schemes became continuous improvement became kaizen became innovation culture. The personnel department became human resources became people and culture, and in one organisation I worked with, briefly and gloriously, the Department of Talent. Sensitivity training became T-groups became encounter became away-days became offsites. Time and motion became work study became business process re-engineering became operational excellence became, with the addition of software, workforce optimisation.
There is a lazy explanation for this — consultants need new products — and it is partly true but too cynical to be interesting. Something else is going on as well. Each renaming is an attempt to escape the connotations that have accumulated on the previous term. Engagement was invented, in part, because job satisfaction had come to sound like the employee’s business rather than the employer’s. Wellbeing was reached for because stress had become legally and medically loaded — say stress in a British organisation and you are within one step of the Health and Safety Executive and two of an employment tribunal. Wellbeing carried no such freight, which was the point, and now it does, and something else will be needed.
Words in organisations wear out. They wear out because they are used, and using them attaches them to the history of what was done under their name, and that history is rarely flattering. A term arrives clean, does five years of useful work, absorbs the disappointments of every programme launched under it, and is retired. Then the idea underneath it, which never changed, is reissued.
The practical consequence for anyone trying to think clearly about work is that you must translate constantly. When a client tells me they have an engagement problem, my first job is to find out which of about nine possible situations they are in, since the word covers all of them: people are leaving; people are staying and doing the minimum; a survey score fell; a director read something; two teams hate each other; the work is awful; the pay is bad; there was a restructure eighteen months ago that nobody has recovered from; or nothing at all is wrong and somebody needs a project.
from A Guide to Occupational Psychology: People, Work and Organisations in the Modern UK (2026)
GPT-5.6 Sol:
The passage gets at something real, but I think the mechanism is richer than ‘words wear out’. What wears out is not merely the vocabulary. It is the credibility of a particular managerial framing.
A new term normally arrives carrying three things at once: a description of a problem, an implicit theory of its causes, and a promise that management can act on it. ‘Engagement,’ for example, does not simply rename morale. It subtly recodes the phenomenon. Morale sounds collective, atmospheric, perhaps partly a consequence of conditions imposed from above. Job satisfaction sounds like an attitude held by the employee. Engagement sounds like a variable that can be measured, benchmarked and managed. Belonging shifts the frame again, toward identity and inclusion. The underlying territory overlaps heavily, but the words distribute responsibility differently.
That is why I would resist one proposition in the passage: that ‘the idea underneath it … never changed’. Sometimes it genuinely does change, even if much less than the rhetoric implies. Time-and-motion study, business-process re-engineering and contemporary workforce optimisation belong to the same genealogy of labour rationalisation, but they aren’t identical ideas. Taylorist observation of individual tasks, Hammer-and-Champy-style redesign of end-to-end processes, and algorithmic scheduling or workforce analytics have different objects, technologies and possibilities for control. What persists is less a single idea than a recurring managerial ambition: render work legible, measure it, reorganise it, and extract greater performance from it.
The renamings are therefore doing several kinds of work.
One is the euphemism-treadmill function described in the passage. A term becomes associated with failed initiatives, cynical employees, embarrassing surveys, consultants’ slide decks and managerial hypocrisy. Eventually the word itself activates the memory of those failures. Changing the vocabulary provides a temporary reputational reset. ‘Transformation’ can mean roughly what the last ‘change programme’ meant, while allowing everyone to behave as though this attempt belongs to a different category.
But there is also a jurisdictional function. Professions create vocabulary partly to establish ownership over problems. Calling something ‘poor morale’ invites ordinary-language explanations: perhaps the boss is unpleasant or the wages are bad. Calling it an ‘employee engagement deficit’ creates an object that appears to require measurement instruments, benchmark databases, engagement specialists and executive dashboards. The phenomenon has been converted from something people can talk about into something experts can administer.
This is one reason jargon proliferates even without cynical intent. Technical vocabulary can genuinely increase precision inside a discipline, but organisational vocabulary often performs the reverse operation: it creates the appearance of precision while increasing semantic breadth. ‘Culture’ is the supreme example. It can mean norms, leadership behaviour, incentives, interpersonal manners, organisational structure, recruitment patterns, informal power, risk tolerance, office atmosphere or almost anything else. Its usefulness is partly that it postpones the question of what specifically is wrong.
The passage’s final paragraph is consequently stronger than its historical thesis. ‘Engagement problem’ is usually not a diagnosis. It is a container category. Treating it as a diagnosis produces exactly the familiar organisational pathology: administer the engagement survey, discover that engagement is low, create an engagement action plan, appoint engagement champions and repeat the survey. The language has allowed an observation about people’s responses to work to become detached from the work itself.
There is a further reason for churn that the passage only hints at: new terminology makes old interventions politically available again. An organisation may be unable to announce another ‘cost-cutting programme’ eighteen months after the previous one. It can announce ‘operational excellence’. Managers may resist another ‘reorganisation’ but accept an ‘operating-model redesign’. Employees who would laugh at ‘team-building exercises’ can be sent to an ‘offsite’. Renaming does not merely conceal continuity from employees; it also helps decision-makers overcome their own institutional memory.
And management fashions have a peculiar lifecycle. Initially the concept is underspecified, which is an advantage: many constituencies can project their aspirations onto it. It then becomes successful enough to be operationalised. Operationalisation produces surveys, frameworks, certifications, KPIs, consultants, mandatory training and reporting structures. Those mechanisms make the concept concrete—but they also expose contradictions between the aspiration and organisational reality. Employees learn that ‘speak-up culture’ may coexist with punishment for speaking up; ‘wellbeing’ may coexist with impossible workloads; ‘empowerment’ may coexist with six approval layers. Cynicism attaches first to the programme and then to its vocabulary. A fresh expression becomes attractive because it restores the original ambiguity.
So the process might be described more precisely as:
problem → attractive abstraction → management programme → measurement → bureaucratisation → disappointed expectations → semantic contamination → replacement abstraction.
That also explains why the lifespan need not be literally five years. Terms survive for as long as they retain enough ambiguity to unite people who mean different things by them. Once everybody knows what ‘employee engagement initiative’ actually entails in this organisation, much of the phrase’s symbolic usefulness has disappeared.
There is also an important power dimension. The successive names often move attention away from potentially contentious material explanations. ‘Industrial relations’ foregrounds relations between organised groups with conflicting interests. ‘Employee relations’ is softer. ‘People and culture’ can make the same domain sound almost entirely consensual. Likewise, ‘work stress’ encourages questions about workload, hours and management practices; ‘resilience’ can redirect attention toward the individual’s capacity to endure them. That does not make resilience or wellbeing illegitimate concepts. It means that vocabulary can change the unit of analysis, and therefore the interventions that appear sensible.
This is why translating jargon back into observable propositions is such a useful intellectual discipline. When someone says ‘We need to improve belonging,’ useful questions are not initially about belonging programmes. They are things like: Who is experiencing what? What behaviour are we observing? Compared with when? Where? What consequences follow? What changed beforehand? By the time those questions are answered, ‘belonging’ may turn out to mean exclusion from promotion, a remote-working problem, hostility between occupational groups, lack of informal contact, a manager playing favourites, or nothing measurable whatsoever.
The deeper subject here, then, is not really euphemism. It is organisational abstraction. Organisations need abstractions because thousands of local events have to be compressed into concepts that senior people can discuss and govern. But compression destroys information. Then the abstraction acquires institutional machinery of its own, until eventually people begin managing the word rather than the phenomenon.
There is an amusing final irony in that occupational psychology itself participates in exactly this process. The discipline repeatedly produces increasingly refined constructs, scales and labels partly because distinctions genuinely matter and partly because academic and professional systems reward novelty. ‘Burnout,’ ‘engagement’, ‘psychological safety’, ‘thriving’, ‘flourishing’, ‘meaningful work’ and adjacent constructs are not simply synonyms. But their empirical correlations are often substantial, and organisations consuming the research can turn fine theoretical distinctions back into interchangeable fashionable nouns.
So I would amend the passage’s central claim slightly. Organisational words do not wear out merely because they are used. They wear out because eventually experience catches up with the promise embedded in them. The replacement word creates a short interval during which the promise is once again larger than the accumulated evidence.
And that makes the final diagnostic habit—translating the fashionable noun back into concrete events—arguably the most important point in the extract. It is not anti-jargonism. It is a safeguard against mistaking a management category for an explanation.
Claude Fable 5.1:
This is a version of what linguists call the euphemism treadmill, but with a twist that makes it more interesting than the standard case. Pinker’s examples work because the referent itself is stigmatised: the word for a toilet or a disability absorbs the discomfort of the thing and has to be replaced. In the organisational version the underlying thing isn’t shameful at all. Nobody is embarrassed by the idea that people should want to come to work. What contaminates the word is the record of what was done under it, the specific programmes, the survey that was launched and then ignored, the away-day that everyone remembers for the wrong reasons. So the mechanism you’re describing is contamination by practice rather than by object, and that suggests the churn rate is really a measure of how often initiatives disappoint. A term that lasted thirty years would be evidence of something.
I’d push on the claim that the ideas underneath stay still, because your own best example cuts slightly against it. The move from job satisfaction to engagement did change something real: not the psychology but the ownership. Satisfaction is a thing the employee has; engagement is a thing the employer extracts and can be scored on, which is why it came bundled with an instrument and a business case. Stress to wellbeing is the same move in the opposite direction, shifting responsibility from the organisation (which can be sued for causing stress) towards the individual (who can be given an app for their wellbeing). So the renaming often isn’t just cosmetic escape from connotations; it is a quiet renegotiation of who is accountable for the problem. That seems worth saying explicitly, because it explains why the new word is always chosen by one side. Employees rarely coin these terms.
On the cynical explanation, I think there’s a less lazy version that deserves its place. The demand for new language comes as much from buyers as from sellers. A manager who launches a wellbeing programme can do so without conceding that the stress programme failed, because it is officially a different thing. Renaming is the cheapest available form of face-saving, and it lets organisations reset the clock without an inquest. That makes the treadmill something worse than a marketing cycle: it is a forgetting machine. The literature on why quality circles fizzled in the 1980s is directly relevant to anyone running an innovation-culture initiative, and almost nobody running one will read it, because it is filed under a dead word. Every renaming severs the new programme from the evidence base of the old, and the field ends up perpetually young.
The nine-situations list at the end is the strongest part, and it makes a point that could be drawn out further: the vagueness isn’t accidental. A word that covers nine situations is useful precisely because it lets a director commission work without committing to a diagnosis, and a consultant accept it without having to tell the director which of the nine they’re in. Translation is your first job because ambiguity was somebody else’s first choice.
Two small things. Wellbeing is already acquiring its freight, which supports your point; ‘wellbeing washing’ is in circulation, and the critique that yoga sessions are being offered in place of manageable workloads is now standard. Psychological safety looks like the next term about a third of the way through its five years. And you might note the contrary case, which does exist: some terms are retired not because they failed but because they became too closely identified with one vendor. Engagement was becoming Gallup’s word, Six Sigma was Motorola’s and then GE’s, and part of the appetite for a fresh term is simply the wish not to appear to have bought someone else’s product.
